Mieke Meijer came up with the idea to use piles of discarded daily newspaper making it into a renewed material. The layer of paper appear like lines of a wood grain and the rings of a tree just like a real wood when the Newspaper Wood is cut. It can be cut, milled and sanded and generally treated like other type of wood.
Category Archives: Environment
Feel-Good Science Story of the Week
Incarcerate Willy (What, too soon?)
It gives me hope that, even in this time of rampant miscommunication and misconceptions about climate science, there are still people who know how to assess credibility. And some of them are only seven.
Oh, Ratfarts
Methane Releases From Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
[T]he permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
The OJ Moment
The Attack on Climate-Change Science
Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century
Awesome post by Bill McKibben, embedded in another post, comparing the climate denialist tactics with those of OJ’s defense team, and why so many people are buying the argument.
If anything, they [the defense team] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.
I also thought this was especially good:
Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.
The feedback problem here is that since they have money, they can buy politicians, who are happy to conclude that global warming is a myth and confound legislation meant to rectify the situation.
Ironic
Solder is a nice woody word, even though it contains tin. And for even more irony (and silvery), there is a new solder that contains iron and silver, and eliminates lead.
Magnetic solders are a leap towards green alternatives
By subjecting the solder to an alternating magnetic field, the solder can be selectively heated. This keeps surrounding materials at safe temperatures while melting only the solder itself.
…
[A]n external magnetic field can be used to remotely manipulate the solder, so it can be moved into hard-to-reach places, such as narrow vertical channels. This means that broken connections within devices can be “self-healed” by applying a magnetic field to melt the solder and attach the ends together.
Make Like a Tree
Hamiltonian Function: The Nissan Leaf
Energy efficiency analysis of the new electric car that’s been advertised recently.
Newsworthy
Several more global warming pieces have popped up on my radar recently.
Al Gore’s NYT op-ed We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
While I have pointed out before that you should not hold out much hope for science on the op-ed page, Mr. Gore’s piece has links to actual scientific work, which is generally more than you get from the other side.
Back to the Woodshed with You
Last week I took George Will to task for his scientific illiteracy and misrepresentation of the “no statistically significant warming” statement that has given every global warming denier a naughty tingly feeling during the past few weeks.
I missed something.
I was going to include a graphical example, and I should have, because I would have found one more problem with the statement. I was reading a post over at Skeptical Science, where graphs were included, and did a mental reconstruction and realized my error of omission. I’ll grab the GISS graph from that post (slightly different slope, but the concept is the same), and add in two lines: one representing no increase in T, and one representing twice the amount slope of the best fit.
Now, one can see here that even though it’s obviously not the best fit to the data, the “no increase” line is a semi-plausible fit. It’s possible. But here’s the problem: look at the temperature in 1995 based on the two scenarios. If one is going to claim that the temperature has not increased in the last 15 years, one also has to admit that it’s about a tenth of a degree warmer than we thought it was. So all of the global warming that “didn’t happen” before is even worse, and harder to explain away.
Personally, I think not distorting the science in the first place is probably the best way to proceed.
Hard to Swallow
Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.
The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.
“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”
Don't Call Him a Prophet
NASA’s Prophet Will Give You Nightmares
Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower’s account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It’s hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President’s Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you’ve got this riveting, disorienting book.